City staff heckled at community meeting on Vancouver's centralized recreation centre plan

Mike Hager, Vancouver Sun01.30.2013

Deeply concerned hundreds of seniors filled the Kerrisdale Community centre to stop changes which would effect meal programs and special social events dear to many senior in Vancouver. on January 29, 2013. City Park Board is attempting to changes the centres.Mark van Manen
/ PNG

Deeply concerned hundreds of seniors filled the Kerrisdale Community centre to stop changes which would effect meal programs and special social events dear to many senior in Vancouver. on January 29, 2013. City Park Board is attempting to changes the centres.Mark van Manen
/ PNG

Malcolm Bromley, General Manager of Parks and Recreation, spoke to hundreds of deeply concerned seniors who filled the Kerrisdale Community centre to stop changes which would effect meal programs and special social events dear to many senior in Vancouver. on January 29, 2013. City Park Board is attempting to changes the centres.Mark van Manen
/ PNG

Hundreds of Vancouver residents filled the Kerrisdale Community centre to protest proposed changes to how the city’s community centres are run on January 29, 2013.Mark van Manen
/ PNG

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A rancorous crowd of about 300, mostly seniors, at Kerrisdale Community Centre urged the Vancouver park board on Tuesday night to halt its proposed changes in how the city’s community centres are run.

Park board general manager Malcolm Bromley was booed as he tried to explain the plan, which will be voted on by commissioners in the coming months.

He said it will create a network of centres accessible to all Vancouverites, including those less fortunate than many residents of the upscale Kerrisdale neighbourhood.

“The people in Kerrisdale are very passionate about their community,” Bromley said in an interview after the two-hour meeting, during which the vast majority of speakers expressed strong opposition to the plan.

“There is a divide where it’s primarily a market driven system where (community centre) fees are charged,” he said.

“Where people can pay for those fees, there’s a surplus generated and it works really well here.”

The 40-year-old service model allows volunteer-run, non-profit societies to operate each of Vancouver’s community centres semi-independently. Driven by the interests of the community, they pay for part-time instructors and programs, like dance classes or cedar basket weaving.

Bromley said: “We have some areas of the city where you cannot charge fees and those people desperately need programs.”

Now, core programs like swimming and ice skating as well as caretaking, administration, utilities and other costs associated with the buildings are funded by the park board, Bromley said.

Sylvia Bildfell, who has been coming to the Kerrisdale Community Centre since she was nine years old, said the proposed plan would benefit some centres at the expense of others.

“To put it as nicely as you can, they (the park board) have spent over their budget in some ways and they have been wanting to take control of our finances and our direction of the way we program things,” the 64-year-old said outside the meeting Tuesday night. “They would like some of our volunteers to go to other places.”

Several speakers at Tuesday’s meeting said the proposal is a cash grab and a sign of increasing centralization of civic power by Vision Vancouver, which has a majority on both city council and the only elected park board in Canada.

A community centre like Kerrisdale’s, with lots of paying members, is able to fund about 70 per cent of its costs through user fees, Bromley said. But other less fortunate centres cannot raise as much through user fees and poorer patrons suffer, he said.

The park board can streamline all revenues and offer a single network of centres to all Vancouverites, Bromley said.

Under the change, money made from programs and room rentals would flow to the park board. The park board would decide how to spend such surpluses, not the community associations that run each centre. However, the associations can keep the roughly $12 million they have accumulated in surpluses over the years.

Several community centre associations from across the city are seeking legal advice and suggest the proposal is a thinly disguised cash-grab by an indebted park board trying to cover its own shortfalls.

These associations are also worried they will be ineligible for millions of dollars in provincial and federal grant money if they become agents of the park board and City of Vancouver.

Last year, the park board announced it faced a $2.4-million shortfall for its $104-million operating budget for 2012, which had it considering various cost-cutting measures. Bromley told the crowd Tuesday night that the board now has a surplus of more than a million dollars and “there’s enough money in the system so that everybody can have their fair access to resources.”

Meanwhile, across the city at Killarney Community Centre on Tuesday, a separate ‘emergency’ residents’ meeting informed the public about proposed changes.

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City staff heckled at community meeting on Vancouver's centralized recreation centre plan

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